Do you really think that the message of a musical piece benefits from adding 3..9 speakers? ..[snip]
It can. The music I've found to benefit most from really good, immersive multichannel playback are audio-only live performance recordings, recorded so as to convey a teleportation-time-machine like experience of being not just at the performance, but present in the actual performance space surrounded by the audience in a convincingly visceral way. To me that is the highest calling of "surround playback" which far exceeds not just studio-produced music mixed for multichannel, but also live music video.. and believe it or not, sound for movies/film/tv! Really. Hear me out.
Beyond reflection on my own subjective enjoyment of that experience and exploration of ways to record in support of it, I speculate that when dome well enough, that verisimilitude may be objectively tied in part to the
absence of visual accompaniment/reinforcement in combination with
a willing suspension of disbelief in the listener. I close my eyes and the only strong perceptual cues available are persuasively convincing that I am actually there (sometimes along with that guy fiddling with the program notes two seats back and over to the left, or that woman distractedly talking back at the bar, or that beer truck backing up on the other side of the amphitheater). The "audio only" aspect of the experience not only makes good seamless multichannel playback valuable due to the absence of visual stimuli, the lack of it encourages engagement of one's visual imagination and a significantly deeper connection the auditory aspects - both in terms of details and cues that are otherwise likely to be overlooked and in terms of the musical and emotional content of the performance. That lack of visual information forces greater attention on the content of the audio, which allows it to be more convincing. The feeling of other audience members listening along is tangible.
That goes for concert videos as well, even ones considered to be well recorded for playback in surround. They may sound good and well produced, but rarely convey a convincing
you are there experience. Rather, the music tends to sound like an album with distant audience added, wrapping around the sides. A sort of synthesized but unreal experience - as if the listener were sitting alone on stage directly in front of the ensemble, but at the same time somehow suspended high above the distant audience.
While I like some dedicated surround music releases and enjoy good up-mixing of 2-channel stereo music at times, for the most part the intent and feel of that stuff comes across just fine via 2-channel stereo. I'm just as content or more listening to that material in 2-channel stereo. Sure some of it is made better in surround, but its not an order of magnitude better like the teleportation-time-machine live performance experience. Same with movies - good surround is great, but its not essential to the experience in the same way, probably because the screen dominates the perceptual experience. The intent of the director still comes across without surround. And even when done excellently, the movie surround experience for me is always one of looking in on the action on screen, watching it in a sort of detached way, even when surrounded with sound, even with an IMAX screen, and not that I've somehow been physically transported to that time and place.
This also applies to immersive non-live-music recordings when a strongly convincing sense of environment is an important focus of the recordings- say as some nature / ambient recordings (wow, I feel like I'm actually in the pond with frogs all around!), but few folks are listening to that kind of material with as much passion and engagement as a moving musical performance.
